Socialist publications like Jacobin and Current Affairs were clear-eyed about the threat Trump posed to democracy and Americans’ basic freedoms. In fact, we warned, as countless left-wing voices had during Barack Obama’s first term, that the mounting terrorism-fighting excesses, warmaking powers, and national security–based rights violations that the Democratic president was racking up were ripe for dangerous future misuse by Trump or another authoritarian.
We continued to make this point during Joe Biden’s presidency, calling for urgent reforms to and rollbacks of what liberals once correctly called the “imperial presidency,” only to be completely ignored, often in the name of party loyalty. In fact, it was actually worse than this: many erstwhile “resisters” stayed mum or actively cheered as Biden and the Democrats expanded the government’s potentially tyrannical surveillance powers and targeting of left-wing activists and poured more money into the what Kamala Harris called, to uproarious applause from a Democratic audience, the “most lethal” military on the globe.
The socialist critique of the Resistance was that simply pointing and shouting “fascism” was not actually enough to stop Trump’s authoritarianism from taking hold. We argued that the only way to effectively resist Trump was to move the focus away from him and other individual figures, and to instead aggressively attack the conditions that let him flourish: growing wealth inequality and the oligarchic power it created, the economic struggles Obama did too little to alleviate, and the cost-of-living pressures that now everyone acknowledges fed Trump’s 2024 victory.